


Amanda B. and the Holistics

by strix_alba



Series: Hearts and Stars [2]
Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Implied Relationships, POV Multiple, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-19 02:46:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13695270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: In which the founding members of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency launch an improbably successful three-person offensive against the CIA, and Amanda Brotzman saves the universe.Alternatively: Todd and Amanda try to tell their parents about what they've been up to lately.





	Amanda B. and the Holistics

**Author's Note:**

> Picks up approximately 3 seconds after Hearts and Stars ends. I have named Todd and Amanda's parents Liz and Rob.
> 
> There will be three chapters once I've finished with ch 2: family reunion, then Plot, then an epiloguey thing.
> 
> Edit 3/15/18: Finally finished watching Season 2! I will try to incorporate as much of the final two episodes of canon as I can reasonably manage without contradicting what I've already posted.

“Did you come by yourself?” she asks, once they’re finally, finally done embracing. She looks over Amanda’s shoulder, and for the first time notices a spray-painted, banged-up black van parked at the end of the driveway.

Amanda follows her gaze. “I got my boys,” she says. “They can wait in the van for a couple minutes. They’re kind of … loud,” she explains, leaning in like she’s sharing a secret.

“They’re the friends you mentioned in your letters?” asks her husband.

“Yup. I’ll introduce you once I — I’ll introduce you in a bit.” Amanda puts her hands on their shoulders — she’s so _fearless_ about touching them, like she was before she became sick — and grins. Her whole face is alight, and Liz remembers, abruptly, the dream she had last week.

“As long as they’re okay with it, dear,” she says. She steps back, and Amanda follows her into the house. She turns around in the doorway and throws up a peace sign. The front window rolls down a few inches. A hand emerges to return the gesture. Amanda shuts the front door.

“What happened to your arm?” Rob asks. “You said you were okay.”

Amanda drops her backpack in the foyer, for all the world as though she’s coming home from school, and sticks her baseball bat in the umbrella stand. “I, uh. Would you believe me if I said it was a rogue cassowary attack?”

“Not likely.”

“Okay … fine, I got into a knife fight.” Amanda makes a face, like she’s talking about accidentally buying sour cream instead of cream cheese. “It’s okay, I swear. Todd took care of me, and my friends beat the crap out of the guy who did it. And no, I didn’t report it to the police, I was still on a Wanted list until like five days ago. Do you have leftovers? The last time I had real food was somewhere in Idaho.”

Liz glances at her husband. “We were just about to eat. Are you friends going to want food, too?”

“Nah, they’ve been fed. Oh! Shit, hang on a second.” Amanda stops in the living room on her way to the kitchen and pulls out a flip phone. “Todd,” she says, by way of explanation. Liz waits, holding her breath on the chance she’ll hear his voice over the phone. Rob touches her back gently.

The call goes to voicemail. Amanda pulls a face. “Hey asshole, it’s me. Pick up your goddamn phone.” She glances at her dad. “Unless you’re driving. Don’t answer if you’re driving.” She snaps the phone shut, opens it, dials again. “Let me try, uh …”

This time, the phone rings twice, and an unfamiliar male voice answers. “Dude, where are you?” Amanda asks. “We’re already at my parents’ house — well I am, the Rowdies are in the van … Okay … okay, you might as well stop for dinner then. See you soon. Bye.” She hangs up. “Todd got sidetracked. Him and his friends will be here tonight. Eventually.”

“Is he … so you two are … talking?” The last that Liz heard about him from her was the postcard from Florida. Their relationship had sounded fairly rocky. She herself has had long, long talks with Rob about how to proceed with their son, once he’s back, but a lot of it depends on Amanda. She’s the one who’s suffered the most in all of this.

“We’re … okay. Yeah. We’re cool. He’s been a shitty brother — a shitty person — for a long time. A long time. I haven’t forgiven him for that … but I kind of like who he is now. He’s still not who I thought he was, but we work well together. And he accepts that he broke our relationship, and it’s going to be different, even when it’s fixed.” Amanda frowns. Liz remembers how stubborn she can be.

“That seems … fair,” her husband says slowly.

Relief shows on Amanda’s face. “Oh, good. I thought maybe you’d want me to forgive him, and that ain’t happening.”

Liz takes a risk and puts her hand on Amanda’s good arm. Amanda doesn’t scream or flinch away. “Honey, I still get mad thinking about the time my sister dipped my dolls’ hair in ink to dye it black, and that was fifty-odd years ago. I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I understand that.”

~~*~~*~~

Amanda talks almost nonstop during dinner, even while chewing. This once, Liz forgives her. The only time she pauses is in the middle of a sentence, during which she stares at her bandaged hand, wide-eyed. Liz can tell that it’s the beginning of a hallucination, that she’s struggling to stay silent … but then the moment passes, and she drops the butter knife from her now-steady hand. “So then this CIA whackjob tried to threaten me, even though he had no idea what was going on, and it was a while after that — oh, shit, I still haven’t — so really, the whole thing started because Patrick Spring — you know, the millionaire? His daughter went missing around the same time — he hired Dirk to solve his own murder, like a month before it happened.”

Liz is not following. There are too many names, and Amanda is speaking too quickly, intonation rising, like every sentence is the one before the punch line of some grand joke. If she hadn’t been told, seen the reports and the warrants with her own eyes, she wouldn’t believe that any of this is real. Everything is so dramatic and improbable.

Amanda looks between her parents and puts down her fork and knife. “This is too much, isn’t it? I should’ve started smaller.”

Rob coughs. “It’s a lot to catch up on,” he says tactfully.

“You wanna meet the Rowdy 3? I promise they’ll be as un-rowdy as possible, but like I said, they’re, uh … rough around the edges.”

Rob raises his eyebrows. “You remember how your mom and I met, right?”

Amanda ducks her head. “They’re not punk-rough, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’re more like … poorly socialized anarchists.”

“Ah. Well, that’s all right.” Liz isn’t a huge fan of anarchists, but she can handle a couple of her daughter’s friends in her home for the night.

Amanda goes out to the van to summon her posse of friends — what was it she’d called them? The Rowdy 3? (A band name? The title of their collective?)

The first surprise is that there are four of them. Less surprising are the bats and sledgehammers and blackjacks that they carry. The second surprise is the way they treat Amanda. They surround her in a protective semicircle on the walk up the driveway, bludgeons swinging, roaring at each other in what appears to be good humor until she waves her hands at them. They quiet in a second.

Amanda stops on the doorstep. “These are my friends. They take care of me.”

“Ha!” shrieks the smallest of her friends. “Yeah, right. _She_ takes care of _us_.”

“It’s a mutual thing, it’s a give and a take,” says the man on Amanda’s left. “Hi, Brotzmans. I’m Martin. That’s Cross, Gripps, Vogel. You know Amanda.”

“It’s nice to meet you all,” says Liz. “Weapons go in the umbrella stand until you leave. You don’t have to take off your shoes, just wipe off the mud on the welcome mat.”

Two of them mutter to each other; but in the end, nearly half a dozen sticks and blunt instruments join Amanda’s spiked baseball bat in the umbrella stand, and the welcome mat is covered in dirt, but the hallway stays relatively clean. The thing to do with anarchists and their ilk, Liz has learned, is to treat them like it’s normal, to act comfortable with their ways until she is comfortable. People going for shock value are easier to manage that way.

Amanda’s friends, it turns out, are also easily amused. They fan out around the house, touching everything and calling to each other while Liz and Rob hover anxiously, until they converge on a photo of Amanda in her high school garage band. Rob looks thoughtful for a moment, then disappears into the music room and reappears a minute later with an old photo album, wading into the knot of strangers. For a while, the living room is full of whoops and howls of delight, and the sound of her daughter and husband laughing together.

Two hours later, she’s managed to move the gathering outside, and Amanda and her friends have started a bonfire in the disused fire pit out back. Liz and Rob have pulled up lawn chairs. Their guests dance around the yard and yammering at each other, over each other, half-sentences and nonsense phrases and inside jokes.

“You know what it’s like?” Rob leans over the arms of their chairs. “It’s like when you and I were in the Hellraisers.”

Liz looks at them. “God, we weren’t this … obnoxiously pleased with ourselves, were we?” she wonders aloud.

Rob laughs. “Probably. We were in our twenties.”

Liz is going to point out that Martin and Cross, at least, are well out of their twenties, when Amanda’s phone rings across the fire pit. “Asswipe,” she yells into the receiver then, “Oh, hey Farah! We’re around the back. Come on already!” She skips around the fire and plants herself in front of her parents. “Todd’s here!”

“Who were you talking to?” asks Liz.

“Farah. She’s a total badass, and super weird. You’ll love her.” Amanda swings around to face the house. 

Liz stands up, heart pounding painfully. She is short of breath and shivering despite the heat of the mysteriously large bonfire. Over the shouting of Amanda’s friends, she can hear voices coming around the yard, and then … and then her son. It’s been almost fifteen months since she’s seen him, and she’s expecting … something different. Amanda has certainly changed up her look. But the only thing different is the way that he carries himself: more relaxed, confident, walking between two strangers.

The confidence vanishes when he meets her eyes. He swallows visibly in the firelight, shoulders rising. The man on his right gives him a little push forwards. The Rowdy 3 quiet down. They hover on the edges of Liz’s vision, leaning forwards, anticipatory.

“Hi Mom. Hi Dad,” says Todd. His eyes glitter, and light spills over onto his cheeks. “I’m so sorry.” He moves towards them, and Rob steps forwards ahead of Liz, and then they are hugging. Todd’s face is pressed against her shoulder and the strength of his arms crushes Rob against her side. Todd’s shoulders shake; he lifts his face, and draws in a watery gasp by her ear.

“Oh, Todd,” says Rob, half word, half exhausted sigh. He brings his arms more tightly around them both.

She feels a warm weight across her back. She looks up and sees Amanda, serene-looking: one arm around Liz, one arm around her brother. She is touching all of her family at once. They’re _here_. They’re safe.

“Yo! It’s a group hug! Pile in, boys, pile in!” she hears one of Amanda’s friends shout.

The moment, the overwhelming relief of her family, her family together again, dissipates in a sudden mob of limbs and yodeling and smoky, sweaty skin, crushing her closer to her children and her husband. “Ow! Watch the arm,” Amanda yelps, followed by a chorus of apologies and shuffling around. It’s a different kind of nice, familiar but less intense.

Eventually, they disentangle themselves, and she can breathe again. Amanda punches Todd’s shoulder, and then grabs his two friends by the hands. “Come on, are you going to introduce everyone, or do I have to?”

Todd’s eyebrows and mouth go through an amusingly horrified series of expressions. “Hell no. Mom, Dad, this is Dirk Gently and Farah Black. Dirk and Farah, these are our parents.”

His friend Dirk leans in to shake Liz’s hand, then her husband’s. “Hi. I’m Todd’s best friend, and Farah is his ex-girlfriend. We’re going to start a detective agency now that the CIA and the FBI are no longer actively trying to kill us.”

Liz’s smile freezes and slides off her face. She looks at Todd, whose expression is squirrelly, and Amanda, whose eyebrows are raised impossibly high.

“Is that why you were both out of the country for a while?” Rob asks. He sounds perfectly calm, and Liz is so, so grateful to him for that, because her brain slowed down around ‘ex-girlfriend’ and froze up completely at ‘CIA’.

“Eh,” says Todd. “Kind of. There was a case — it ended up being connected to what we were doing anyway,” — 

“Everything is connected,” says Dirk.

“I mean, _now_ it is. For real, everything,” says Amanda.

“Yes, yes, and we’re all very grateful.” Dirk flaps a hand at her.

Liz catches her husband’s eye. She clears her throat. “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we sit down by the fire, and you can tell us all about it?”

They don’t get the full rundown that night; it’s too late, and everyone is humming with too much excess energy to tell it properly. They get through the story of how Amanda met the Rowdy 3, and how she and Todd met Dirk and Farah, before it devolves into bantering and drumming and dancing again. Once the storytelling attempts are officially abandoned, Liz goes inside to get out her acoustic guitar. She passes it to Todd, who spins out the random snatches of music that everyone is singing into a song to which Amanda and all of the Rowdies seem to know the words. Farah claps the beat, looking unsure of herself. 

Liz waits a bit to get the melody before she joins in a largely-wordless harmony. She isn’t sure if they appreciate it, but — she can’t not. The music reverberates in her chest, and the raucous chorus of voices — her children and their friends, her family together — draws heat to her cheeks. Gripps stops singing long enough to give her a strangely sweet smile and two thumbs up. Dirk sits with his hands clasped, eyes going from Todd’s face to Todd’s hands to the whole crowd of them. He catches her eye and beams at her earnestly. Her husband wraps an arm around her shoulders and hums off-key.

Liz cannot remember the last time she was this content.

~~*~~*~~

Liz wakes up the next morning around eight, panics briefly at the late hour, and then remembers, in quick succession:

1\. Her children are alive.  
2\. Her children are visiting.  
3\. She emailed her classes last night to let them know she had a family emergency and was canceling class for today.  
4\. There are people sleeping in the music room — technically a spare bedroom — and more people in the basement.

Her husband is still asleep. She slides quietly out of bed and walks down the carpeted hallway towards the kitchen … and jumps back, hands in fists, when she sees someone already sitting at the kitchen table.

“Good morning,” says Dirk. “Would you like some tea? Or — you’re a coffee drinker, aren’t you?”

Liz blinks at him. “I’ll make myself coffee.” She sets about doing so. “Did you sleep all right?”

“Magnificently, aside from the part where Todd barnacled all over me. Very uncomfortable. He is surprisingly sharp and pointy. I’m not a teddy bear.”

Liz leans back against the counter. “He did that when he and Amanda were kids. We’d stay in hotels, they shared a bed. Every morning it was Amanda complaining about how he tried to smother her in her sleep.” She does not miss that part of them being children one bit.

“I had the impression that they’d always gotten along,” says Dirk. “Todd and Amanda.”

“Sure. Doesn’t mean they weren’t at each other’s throats sometimes.” 

“Fascinating. I was an only child. Is that a normal … sibling thing?”

“Pretty normal, yeah. You get people all over the spectrum. My sister and I didn’t have a great relationship until we were both out of school, but my brother and I, it was the opposite: we were great up until he got a job in accounting, and suddenly my lifestyle choices were a moral failing on my part.”

“Your lifestyle choices?” Dirk asks.

He sounds genuinely interested, rather than asking for the sake of politeness, so Liz elaborates. “I quit my job as a traveling sales rep after college and took a shitty coffee shop job so I could join a rock band. It was New Jersey in the early 80s, there was a scene there. It’s where I met Rob; he was designing band posters and album art for years before he got into IT, believe it or not.”

“Oh, that’s where they get it from,” he says, face lighting up. “The music, I mean. And the whole … angry grungy thing.”

Liz sips her coffee to hide her smile. “I like to think they’d have gotten there on their own. But yes, that probably helped.”

~~*~~*~~

“Your friends are welcome to stay, if they want,” Liz insists. “We’re not going to throw them out just because they’re anarchists.”

“Trust me, it’s better if they bounce. They’re not good at staying in one place,” says Amanda.

“Do they need … directions anywhere? Local sights to see?” It seems unlikely, but books and covers and judging and all that.

Amanda snorts. “Nah. They’ll amuse themselves for twenty-four hours and come to pick me up tomorrow afternoon.” Amanda turns around. “You got that?” she yells out the front door. “Come get me tomorrow!”

The van idling in the driveway rumbles and rocks back and forth. The duffel bags and grubby bundles strapped to the roof don’t even budge as it lurches out of the driveway and down the street. Amanda watches it go fondly, leaning out of the door until it’s out of sight. She looks … secure. Calm. Liz is pleased.

They head back into the living room. Todd is on the couch, wedged between his friends. Amanda insinuates herself between him and Farah, one leg thrown across his knees and her not-bandaged arm on the back of the couch over Farah’s shoulders. Liz sits down in the armchair opposite her husband. “Okay,” she says, “Tell us everything.”


End file.
